José Antonio Maravall. Utopia and Counterutopia in the
Quixote. Translated by Robert W. Felkel. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1991. 255 pp.

James A. Parr's final sentence in his review
of Maravall's Utopia y contrautopia en el Quijote (Hispanic
Review 48: 249-51) states unequivocally that the book belongs in
every Cervantine scholar's personal library. While the praise for the
book is clear, an implicit note of limitation is also clear: if the reader
is not a Cervantine scholar, the interest diminishes.
This is, perhaps, the center of critique to
Felkel's translation: its necessity. If Parr's appreciation was correct,
and if we assume that most if not all Cervantine scholars read
Spanish, then the natural addressee of the translation is not that of the
original. And since the original was interesting

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Cervantes

mostly to Cervantine scholars, one is compelled to reevaluate Parr's verdict
and to try to ascertain whether or not we are faced with a book that can
be of interest to English-speaking readers of the Quixote, or to
English-speaking scholars interested in the vast field of Utopia or, more
generally, in the political ideas of the Renaissance. For Felkel's translation
to be deemed necessary, it must be of appeal to those readers, and
it must be so fifteen years after the original was published, that is, fifteen
years in which floods of water have passed under the critical bridge. If
we consider that Maravall's book is, in its turn, a reelaboration of a work
dating back to 1948, Felkel's task might very well be Herculean indeed,
quixotic.
Maravall's book places itself at the extreme
end of a critical spectrum of which the other extreme could be Cesáreo
Bandera's now famous statement: El único tema del Quijote
es el Quijote mismo. That is, Maravall's reading of the
Quixote is not just contextual, but a reading of the context, rather
than a reading of the text. Even at the time of Parr's review, the book was
already traditional, old-fashioned, and had an almost
total disregard for contemporary criticism. For instance, it did not incorporate
until its last revision the distinction between the character Don Quixote
and the author Cervantes, and when it does so, it treats both categories
(the textual and the extra-textual) as belonging to the same realm of
reality.
Fortunately, Felkel is dealing with a classic
from two points of view: it is a classic essay, and it deals with a classic
book. Maravall's piece of thought, like Unamuno's Vida de don Quijote
y Sancho or Ortega's Meditaciones del Quijote, has an intrinsic
value which transcends the always arguable limitations that stem from its
inherent and inherited method of analysis. Maravall's view is
informative, for it puts together data collected over many decades of
scholarship, plus it is original, seductive at times, intelligent like that
of other dead scholars/thinkers with dead methods/methodologies, such as
a Foucault or a Goldmann. The lure of Felkel's translation is to offer the
wide world outside professional Cervantism one of the best books by one of
the best critical Spanish writers of recent times. It should be read for
the same reasons that Lukács or Bakhtine are still read or
are re-read after hiatus of interest.
Also, with deconstruction and reader-response
criticism (to name only the two perceived adversarial approaches that Parr
named) receding, it is perhaps the case that the most adverse times for
Maravall's book were then, not now. A book that deals with Utopia is, by
necessity, an important book at a time in which focus among Cervantists is
shifting somewhat to the Persiles, with its opposition to the
Quixote being posited as that of a reconstruction vis-á-vis
the Quixotesque destruction of a perfect dream. For Parr, Maravall's book
was even more important if we considered the Quixote a satire as
he does. For this reviewer, Felkel's translation comes at the precise time
in which interest in the countersatire (the Persiles) reaches a peak,
with a recent English translation of the other Cervantine masterpiece.
If Parr could recommend the original to Cervantists, I can recommend Felkel's
translation as a companion book to the recently acquired Persiles
in English.

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As for the translation itself, Felkel makes his own St. Jerome's words
non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensum. I
must say that some times he stretches the intention somewhat. Maravall is
a concise writer, as Unamuno was, and it is on more than one occasion that
we find the quality of the original in the precise and exact verbum,
more than in the sensum. To give but two examples; Felkel translates
as in the face of contemporary escapism (33) Maravall's words
porque no hallaba respuesta válida en el mito pastoril a los
problemas de su sociedad, or, when Maravall writes . . .
aparecer tan tempranamente entre nosotros la figura del Estado moderno. Esta
se vio desnaturalizada y confundida . . . , Felkel
translates not the figure of the modern state, but simply the
modern state, implying that what becomes in the translation
perverted and confused is not as in Maravall the
figure or image, of the state, but the state itself. Aside from that
lack of precision at times, Felkel's text is an elegant piece of prose in
itself, which pays due homage to the recently disappeared Spanish master.